Communication Quarterly Vol. 63, No. 5, November–December 2015, pp. 527–532 Teaching Rhetoric of Health and Medicine to Undergraduates: Citizens, Interdisciplinarity, and Affect Jamie Landau & Davi Johnson Thornton The challenge of improving the position of rhetorical studies of health and medicine within the more established field of health communication suggests something of the perils and possibilities that Condit (1990) envisioned when she imagined a rhetoric- social science mating. In this vision, social science communication is “the sanctimo- niously chaste youth” and rhetoric is the slutty counterpart or “harlot” who consorts with such shady figures as cultural studies and feminist studies (p. 323). In this scene, social scientists (presumably including the majority of health communication scho- lars) are purists devoted to the discovery of objective, value-free knowledge through methods as scientific as possible, while rhetoric welcomes liaisons with all sorts of bedfellows in the interests of identifying, judging, and even creating values, all in the heady atmosphere of open-ended humanistic inquiry. Condit’s provocative piece offers a place to begin thinking about what happens when rhetorical scholars substantially contribute to health communication curriculum. Rhet- oricians already contribute, of course, but their role is often articulated as supportive or supplementary, working alongside more central players to prepare practitioners for future professions (Goodwin, Dahlstrom, Kemis, Wolf, & Hutchinson, 2014). So tight is the association between health communication and empirically driven outcomes that Elliott (2014) suggested critical scholars abandon the category altogether and establish themselves as scholars of “communication and health” (p. 249). Jamie Landau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Keene State College. Davi Johnson Thornton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Southwestern University. Correspondence: Jamie Landau, Department of Communication and Philosophy, Keene State College, 229 Main Street, Keene, NH 03435. E-mail: jlandau@keene.edu. ISSN: 0146-3373 print/1746-4102 online © 2015 Eastern Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/01463373.2015.1103602